Sound is omnipresent in the ocean. Human-induced noise has the potential to affect marine life.

After the global recession in 2008, the ocean became quieter as shipping declined. Off the coast of Southern California, for example, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that noise amplitudes measured from 2007-2010 were lowered by 70 percent with a reduction in one ship contributing about 10 percent.

A similar quieting of the ocean can be expected as global ship traffic continues its decline in response to the corona virus pandemic. This quieter ocean offers scientists ways to expand their ongoing research on ocean sound and its impact on marine life.

“It takes time to document real change in the ocean, but University of Washington oceanographers have reported that over the past decade, fin whales have been communicating more softly in the Pacific,“ said Deborah Kelley, professor of oceanography at the University of Washington and director of the OOI’s Regional Cabled Array (RCA) component. “A quieter ocean allows us to hear more clearly life and other natural processes within the ocean.”

Years of listening to whales

John Ryan, a biological oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), has been “listening in” on whales and other marine creatures since 2015 using a hydrophone on the Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS), a cabled observatory, which was in part established as a test bed for the OOI Regional Cabled Array. Ryan and colleagues studied the occurrence of humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) song in the northeast Pacific using three years of continuous recordings off the coast of central California.

“We’ve been listening almost continuously since July 28, 2015, using a broadband, digital, omnidirectional hydrophone connected to MARS. Listening continuously for that long at such a high sample rate is not easy; only by being connected to the cable is this possible,” explained Ryan.

The researchers were able to discern whale songs from the busy ocean soundscape in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which is a feeding and migratory habitat for humpback whales. The humpbacks’ song was detectable for nine months of the year (September–May) and peaked during the winter months of November through January. The study revealed strong relationships between year-to-year changes in the levels of song occurrence and ecosystem conditions that influence foraging ecology. The lowest song occurrence coincided with anomalous warm ocean temperatures, low abundances of krill – a primary food resource for humpback whales, and an extremely toxic harmful algal bloom that affected whales and other marine mammals in the region. Song occurrence increased with increasingly favorable foraging conditions in subsequent years.

Because the hydrophone is on the cabled observatory, its operation can be adjusted to achieve new goals. For example, the sampling rate of the hydrophone was doubled during an experiment that successfully detected very high frequency echolocation clicks of dwarf sperm whales (with Karlina Merkens, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). “And that’s a beautiful aspect of being on the cable,” added Ryan. “Not only do we know that it is working, we catch any network glitches pretty quickly so we don’t lose data, and we can do real-time experiments like these.”

William Wilcock of the University of Washington and his students have compiled a decade worth of data on fin whales in the northern Pacific. Fin whales call at about 20 HZ, which is too low of a frequency for humans to hear, but perfect for seismometers to record. The researchers aggregated ten years of data from both temporary recorders and now permanent RCA hydrophones and seismic sensors and looked at the frequency of the calls and calling intervals. The researchers found both have changed over time.

The fin whales call seasonally and the frequency of the calls has gone down with time.

Calls peak in late fall, early winter in relation to mating season. Gradually through the season the frequency decreases. At the start of the next season, the call frequency jumps up again, but not quite to where it was the year before. Over ten years, the frequency has gone down about 2 HZ, and scientists are puzzled as to why this is occurring. It is unlikely to be due to increasing ship noise, because this lower sound frequency is getting closer to the range of the noise level of container ship propellers, about 6-10 HZ.

In some settings, ship noise is known to affect whale behavior and the permanent network of hydrophones operated by the OOI and Ocean Networks Canada will provide an opportunity to study whether whales are avoiding the shipping lanes to Asia.

Volcanoes also rumble in the deep

Whale sounds are but one of many acoustic signals being recorded and monitored using hydrophones and broadband seismometers. The OOI’s RCA off the Oregon Coast includes 900 kilometers (~560 miles) of submarine fiber-optic cables that provide unprecedented power, bandwidth, and communication to seafloor instrumentation and profiler moorings that span water depths of 2900 m to 5 m beneath the ocean surface. Using a suite of instruments connected to the cable, which continuously stream data in real time, scientists are listening in on the sounds of submarine volcanism, which accounts for more than 80 percent of all volcanism on Earth.

More than 300 miles off the Oregon coast in 1500 meters of water, 20+ cabled seafloor instruments are located at the summit of Axial Seamount, the most active volcano on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, including hydrophones and seismometers, which can also record sounds in the ocean.

“Scientists were able to hear(as acoustic noises traveling through the crust) >8000 earthquakes that marked the start of the Axial eruption in 2015. Coincident with this seismic crisis bottom pressure tilt instruments showed that the seafloor fell about 2.4 meters (~8 feet).

It was a remarkable collaborative event with scientists from across the country witnessing the eruption unfold live,” added Kelley. Such real-time documenting of an eruption in process was possible because of how Axial is wired. It is the only place in the oceans where numerous processes taking place prior to, during, and following a submarine eruption are captured live through data streaming 24/7. William Wilcock, University of Washington, and Scott Nooner, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and colleagues reported these findings in Science, 2016.

Data collected from the hydrophones at the seamount’s base supported another discovery about Axial, indicating that it explosively erupted in 2015. Hydrophones recorded long-duration diffusive signals traveling through the ocean water consistent with explosion of gas-rich lavas, similar to Hawaiian style fissure eruptions. Follow-on cruises documented ash on some RCA instruments, again indicating the likelihood of explosive events during the 2015 eruption.

“Having the opportunity to listen in while a submarine volcano is active offers a really interesting window into things,” said Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, associate dean at Western Washington University and lead author of a G-cubed article that reported the possible eruptive findings. “While we cannot say with utter certainty that there were explosions at Axial, there’s a lot of evidence that supports this. We know from having listened to other eruptions that this was the same type of sound. It’s distinct, like the hissing sound of a garden hose on at top speed. We also found these really fine particulates, which could only have resulted from an eruption, had collected on one of the instruments at the site.”

Added Caplan-Auerbach, “My favorite part of having OOI is it offers an ability for pure discovery. Its real time nature makes it possible to observe and see what happens. And sometimes the planet just hands you a gift that you didn’t expect. Not always being hypothesis driven is a very valuable aspect of science that I hope does not get lost. I’m very appreciative of projects like this that open our eyes into signals that we didn’t know were there.”

More opportunities to expand knowledge about sound and the sea are on the horizon. The US. Navy has funded Shima Abadi, University of Washington, Bothell, for a comprehensive study of sounds recorded by the OOI hydrophones. Stay tuned!

“Just like lightning,” in one-minute presentations, 15 scientists shared amazing ways they are using OOI data in scientific investigations and in the classroom. This round of lightning talks capped the Ocean Observatories Initiative Facility Board’s (OOIFB) Town Hall at the 2020 Ocean Sciences Meeting on 20 February, demonstrating the multiple and creative ways OOI data are being used to answer key science questions in a changing environment.

The presentations ranged from how students are using real-life and real-time OOI data to advance their understanding of scientific principles to how researchers are using OOI data to identify the presence of marine life by sound to how modelers are making OOI data more accessible and useable.

Presenters line up for the quick lightning session during the OOIFB Town Hall at the 2020 Ocean Sciences meeting.

“We were simply thrilled by the depth, breadth, and range of applications of OOI data shown during this lightning round,” Kendra Daly, chair of the OOIFB. “We were pleased so many presenters were willing to accept the challenge. This enthusiastic response clearly shows that OOI data are being used to help answer important science questions.”

Brief summaries of the talks are presented below.

Advancing science

Isabela Le Bras, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, reported on a recent article in Geophysical Research Letters, where she and her colleagues describe how they used data from the Irminger Sea Array moorings (2014–2016) to identify two water masses formed by convection and showing that they have different rates of export in the western boundary current. Upper Irminger Sea Intermediate Water appears to form near the boundary current and is exported rapidly within three months of its formation. Deep Irminger Sea Intermediate Water forms in the basin interior and is exported on longer time scales. The subduction of these waters into the boundary current is consistent with an eddy transport mechanism. The eddy transport process is more effective for the waters cooled near the boundary current, implying that cooling near boundary currents may be more important for the climate than has been appreciated to date.

Since 2017, Clare Reimers and Kristen Fogaren, Oregon State University, have been working to assess seasonal variability in benthic oxygen consumption and the contribution of benthic respiration to the development of hypoxic conditions in the northern California Current, using time series data from the OOI Endurance Array. Reimers and Fogaren measured benthic oxygen consumption rates using in situ eddy covariation techniques and ex situ core incubations, during a series of ten cruises that allowed sampling near the Endurance Oregon Shelf and Inshore stations, in all seasons. During these cruises, the researchers used real-time data provided by the Endurance Array to optimize the settings for their eddy covariance deployments. They are now examining property-relationships in discrete bottom water samples collected during the cruises and using data from OOI assets to help separate influences of mixing and biochemical processes in the water column and sediments. The researchers are also synthesizing benthic flux measurements and placing these rates in the context of cross-shelf glider measurements and benthic node time series.

Adrienne Silver, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth provided details about how she is using Pioneer Array data to learn more about the influence of warm core rings on Shelf break circulation. Results from a 40-year Warm Core Ring census show a regime shift in warm core ring formation at 2000, with the number of rings doubling from an average of 18 rings per year (during 1980-1999) to 33 rings per year (during 2000-2019). This regime shift creates a large increase in the amount of warm salty water being transported northward toward the shelf from the Gulf Stream. The preferred pathway of these rings, or the Ring Corridor seem to indicate their proximity to the shelf break and the Pioneer array during their lifetime. The goal of Silver’s project is to understand how these warm core rings affect the shelf break exchange while traveling along the shelf. A large focus of the study will be on the salinity intrusion events which might be sourced from these warm core rings.

Liz Ferguson, CEO and founder of Ocean Science Analytics, is using data from OOI’s Coastal Endurance and Regional Cabled Arrays to determine the variables that are most useful for assessing the ecosystem of this region and obtaining baseline information on marine mammal acoustic presence for use in monitoring. Using long term physical and biological data provided by these arrays, Ferguson is assessing long-standing shifts in the ecology of this coastal and offshore environment by associating physical oceanographic variables with the vocal presence of marine mammals using the broadband hydrophone data. Temporal changes in the occurrence of marine mammal species such as killer whales, sperm whales and dolphins can be used as an indicator of ecosystem shifts over time. She is analyzing passive acoustic data provided by the OOI arrays to determine the presence of vocally active marine mammal species, identify their spatial and temporal use of these sites, and combining this information with the physical oceanographic variables to assess the ecological characteristics associated with marine mammal occurrence.

Sam Urmy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) also is using OOI acoustical data in his research. Using an upward-looking echosounder and a high-frequency hydrophone at MBARI’s Monterey Accelerated Research System, Urmy showed how small animals in the epipelagic and mesopelagic altered their behavior in response to predators. These responses included abrupt dives during bouts of foraging by dolphins, changes in depth to avoid predatory fish schools, and dramatic alterations to daily vertical migratory behavior. Continual observations of the mesopelagic with active and passive acoustics are revealing several dynamic predator-prey interactions in an ecosystem that is typically thought of as relatively slow and static.

Veronica Tamsitt of the University of New South Wales used the OOI’s Southern Ocean mooring and the Southern Ocean Flux Site (SOFS, in the Southeast Indian) to study the Sub Antarctic Mode water (SAMW) formation. Tamsitt’s and her colleagues findings were reported in the Journal of Climate in March 2020. Using data from the two mooring locations, the researchers were able to compare and contrast characteristics and variability of air-sea heat fluxes, mixed-layer depths, and SAMW formation. The researchers found that inter mixed-layer depth anomalies tended to be intermittent at the two moorings, where anomalously deep mixed layers were associated with anomalous advection of cold air from the south, and conversely shallow mixed layers correspond to warm air from the north. Both the winter heat flux and mixed-layer depth anomalies, however, showed a complex spatial pattern, with both positive and negative anomalies in both the Indian and Pacific basins that Tasmitt and colleagues relate to the leading modes of climate variability in the Southern Ocean.

Editor’s note: The Southern Ocean Array was decommissioned in January 2020. Its data, however, are still available for use by researchers, students, and the public.

Bringing OOI data into the classroom

Sage Lichtenwalner, Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey reported on the progress of the Ocean Data Labs Project. This project is a Rutgers-led effort to build a “Community of Practice” to tap into the firehose of OOI ocean data to support undergraduate education. To date, the project has hosted four “development” workshops that introduced participants to the OOI, conducted data processing with Python notebooks, and shared effective teaching strategies, in addition to a series of introductory workshops and webinars. As part of the development workshops, 56 university, college, and community college faculty designed 19 new “Data Explorations,” featuring web-based interactive “widgets” that allow students to interact with pre-selected data from the OOI. The project also sponsors a series of webinars, a fellowship program, and is compiling a library of resources (including coding notebooks, datasets, and case studies in teaching) to help the community.

Cheryl Greengrove, University of Washington Tacoma, summarized an article in the March issue of Oceanography that she and colleagues from across the United States wrote detailing ways to integrate OOI data into the undergraduate curriculum. The wealth of freely-accessible data provided by OOI platforms, many of which can be viewed in real or near-real time, provides an opportunity to bring these authentic data into undergraduate classrooms. The TOS article highlights existing educational resources derived from OOI data that are ready for other educators to incorporate into their own classrooms, as well as presents opportunities for new resources to be developed by the community. Examples of undergraduate introductory oceanography OOI data-based lessons using existing interactive online data widgets with curated OOI data on primary productivity, salinity, and tectonics and seamounts are presented, as well as ways to use OOI data to engage students in undergraduate research. The authors provide a synthesis of existing tools and resources as a practical how-to guide to support new resource development and invite other educators to develop and implement new educational resources based on OOI data.

Matthew Iacchei, Hawaiʻi Pacific University, presented how he has been integrating OOI data explorations to supplement his upper division oceanography lecture and labs with real data from around the world. Last semester, he had students explore patterns of dissolved oxygen and impacts of anoxia at the coastal endurance array in Oregon and compare that data to dissolved oxygen data the students collected in Kāneʻohe Bay, Hawaiʻi. This semester, students are working through two exercises with OOI data as part of their primary productivity lab (perfect, as it is now online!). Students will compare vertical profiles from Hawaiʻi with seasonal variations across the world, and will compare latitudinal drivers of primary production using data from a time-series from the Southern Ocean Array.

Strengthening OOI data usability

Wu-Jung Lee, a senior oceanographer at the Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, is using data collected by the OOI to develop new methodologies for analyzing long-term ocean sonar time series. In a project funded by the National Science Foundation, she and her colleagues show that unsupervised matrix decomposition techniques are effective in discovering dominant patterns from large volumes of data, which can be used to describe changes in the sonar observation. Their preliminary analysis also show that the summaries provided by these methods facilitate direct comparison and interpretation with other ocean environmental parameters concurrently recorded by the OOI. A parallel effort that spun out of this project is an open-source software package echopype, which was created to enable interoperable and scalable processing of biological information from ocean sonar data.

As part of the Rutgers Ocean Modeling Group, in conjunction with University of California Santa Cruz, John Wilkin and Elias Hunter are delivering a high-resolution data assimilative ocean model analysis of the environs of the Pioneer Coastal Array, including a systematic evaluation of the information content of different elements of the observing network. The project uses the Regional Ocean Modeling System with 4-Dimensional Variational data assimilation. To produce a comprehensive multi-year (2014-2018) analysis required them to assimilate all available Pioneer CTD data, with quality checks, in a rolling sequence of data assimilation analysis intervals. They used three days of data in each analysis, which required queries to with a time range constraint and relevant platform (i.e. glider, profiler, fixed sensor), migrating all Pioneer CTD data (wire following profilers, gliders, fixed sensors, plus ADCP velocity) to an ERDDAP server. The simple graphing capabilities in ERDDAP allow quick browsing of the data to trace quality control or availability issues, and ERDDAP provides a robust back-end to other web services to create more sophisticated graphical views, or time series analysis. Using the ERDDAP Slide Sorter tool, they operate a quick look Control Panel to monitor the data availability and quality.

Mitchell Scott and colleagues Aaron Marburg and Bhuvan Malladihalli Shashidhara at the University of Washington, are studying how to segment macrofauna from the background environment using OOI data from the Regional Cabled Axial Seamount Array. Their long-term goal is to use an automated approach to study species variation over time, and against other environmental factors. Their initial step focuses specifically on scale worms, which are very camouflaged, making them difficult to detect. To address this, the researchers initially used a deep learning model, called U-Net, to detect and localize the scale worm locations within an image. To address the high rate of false positives using this model, they added an additional classifier (a VGG-16 model) to verify the presence of scaleworms. This combined, applied approach proved feasible for scale worm detection and localization. Yet because the environment of the Axial Seamount is so dynamic due to the growth and decay of chimneys at the site and resulting changes in bacteria and macrofauna present, they found the performance of the model decreased over time.

Weifeng (Gordon) Zhang of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has been using Pioneer Array data to understand the physical processes occurring at the Mid-Atlantic Bight shelf break, including the intrusion of Gulf Stream warm-core ring water onto the shelf and the ring-induced subduction of the biologically productive shelf water into the slope sea. His findings were reported in a Geophysical Research Letters paper where data from the Pioneer Array moorings and gliders demonstrated the anomalous intrusion of the warm and salty ring water onto the shelf and revealed the subsurface structure of the intrusion. Zhang also shared findings reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans where data from the Pioneer Array showed a distinct pattern of relatively cold and fresh shelf water going underneath the intruding ring water. These results show the subduction of the shelf water into the slope sea and a pathway of shelf water exiting the shelf. In both instances, Zhang and his colleagues used computer modeling to study the dynamics of these water masses. These two studies together suggest that shelf break processes are complex and require more studies in the region.

Hilary Palevsky of Boston College presented results from an ongoing project funded by the National Science Foundation’s Chemical Oceanography program, using biogeochemical data from the OOI Irminger Sea Array. Analysis of dissolved oxygen data on OOI Irminger Sea gliders and moorings from 2014-2016 showed the importance of biogeochemical data collected over the full seasonal cycle and throughout the entire water column, due to the influence of subsurface respiration and deep winter convection on biological carbon sequestration. The OOI Irminger Sea array is the first source of such full-depth year-round data in the subpolar North Atlantic. To quantitatively evaluate the annual rate of carbon sequestration by the biological pump and the role of deep winter convection, Palevsky and colleague David Nicholson of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution collaborated with OOI to improve the calibration of oxygen data at the Irminger Sea array by modifying the configuration of glider oxygen sensors to enable calibration in air each time the glider surfaces, which improves the accuracy and utility of the data collected both from gliders and from moorings. Palevsky presented preliminary results demonstrating successful glider air calibration at the Irminger array in 2018-2019 as well as work by student Lucy Wanzer, Wellesley College, demonstrating the importance of well-calibrated oxygen time series data to determine interannual variability in rates of subsurface respiration and deep winter ventilation in the Irminger Sea.

The OOI is a large infrastructure project designed to be in operation for 25 years; that is long enough for a researcher to spend almost their entire career engaging with the OOI. Because of these new opportunities, students and early career scientists are diving in to the OOI as early adopters of the system and gaining their foothold for the long haul. This summer, the OOI Communications Team will be highlighting some of these scientists and the work they are doing with the OOI, like Dr. Hilary Palevsky, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution studying carbon sequestration in the Irminger Sea.

Having grown up in western Pennsylvania, Palevsky did not foresee becoming an oceanographer. During her junior year at Amherst College, Palevsky had her first opportunity to test her sea legs. After spending a semester at the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program, including ten days aboard the SSV Corwith Cramer tall ship, she was hooked and began her path to pursue a career in oceanography.

Within a few years, Palevsky crossed the country and began work on a PhD in Chemical Oceanography at the University of Washington. Her PhD work focused on the role of sinking organic matter in carbon sequestration (i.e. the Biological Pump). Historically, the contributions of biology to ocean carbon cycling/carbon sequestration have been more intensely studied in the warmer growing season summer months. However, studies have shown that winter might contribute a missing key piece of this sinking organic matter-carbon sequestration puzzle.

“I wanted to study the ocean’s role in climate and how it takes carbon out of the atmosphere,” says Palevsky. “My goal was to look at the balance between biological, physical, and chemical processes and how they allow the ocean to take up carbon.”

Palevsky’s work focused on container ship transects in the north Pacific Ocean where she found that deep winter ventilation reduced the amount of carbon sequestered in the deep ocean by sinking organic matter. However, Palevsky only had access to surface measurements, which left her with lingering questions about the connections between winter ventilation and carbon cycling in the deep ocean.

The OOI provided Palevsky with the missing piece. “The OOI was the only opportunity out there to get that kind of data – winter data and depth profiles,” says Palevsky. So once again Palevsky crossed the country, this time heading to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for her Postdoctoral Scholarship.

Palevsky designed her own Postdoctoral project studying the biological pump and carbon cycling in the Irminger Sea over the entire year and water column. To fund this work, Palevsky applied for the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Postdoctoral Scholarship. “At the time I proposed my project the OOI Irminger Sea Array was not yet online,” reflects Palevsky. “It was a bit of a race as I moved across the country hoping the data would come online in time.”

The Irminger Sea, located southwest of Greenland in the North Atlantic is a critical location for studying the global carbon cycle, deep convection, and carbon sequestration. “The fact that we have biogeochemical measurements year-round and for the full water column from the OOI is incredible,” says Palevsky. “A lot of the other observations available only measure the surface or maybe the top 30 meters.”

To examine the carbon cycle, Palevsky focuses on oxygen, using it as a tracer to look at the balance between photosynthesis and respiration. Oxygen can be a tricky thing to measure, however. “Because of challenges of calibrating oxygen sensors,” notes Palevsky, “the current quality of the data is not accurate enough to be able to get a good picture of the surface oxygen and ocean-atmosphere exchange.”

So once again Palevsky put pen to paper to chart her own course and applied for NSF-funding, with her Postdoctoral sponsor David Nicholson (WHOI), to apply a new approach to enhance the OOI’s ability to calibrate their oxygen sensors and increase the accuracy of those data. “The solution on Argo floats was to move the location of the oxygen optode so that every time a float surfaces it sticks the sensor in the air. You get a one-point calibration and it improves the oxygen data quality. Our thought with this project was that we could apply the same technique to OOI gliders and have them calibrate their oxygen sensors in the air every time they surface.”

Palevsky has just returned from three-weeks at sea on the OOI Irminger Sea turn cruise testing an implementation of this solution on OOI open ocean gliders. “It is so exciting to have these new gliders in the water and to watch them stream back data. Not only are the data they collect more accurate, but they are also passing on their more accurate calibrations to the other oxygen sensors on the array’s four moorings. This is going open new possibilities for what we can learn about carbon cycling from the array.”

In terms of what is next for Palevsky, she will be staying on the East Coast taking on the position of Lecturer at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. For her next OOI adventure, she describes examining mesoscale variability within the Irminger Sea Array and long-term trends and variability in these processes.

The OOI is “Pioneering a place that the oceanography community has agreed where we want to go,” she said. “It is not just locations that are convenient, but locations that we picked because they are interesting and important.”

For her part in the oceanographic community, Palevsky is committed to supporting the next generation of ocean scientists, and took two undergraduate students on the OOI Irminger Sea cruise. You can check out their blog here. Perhaps this will be their SSV Corwith Cramer moment.

Hilary Palevsky on the deck of the R/V Neil Armstrong, with the surface mooring buoy visible in the water to the right of the ship. Photo credit: Lucy Wanzer

Hilary Palevsky preparing to measure the dissolved oxygen concentration of a seawater sample in the main laboratory of the R/V Neil Armstrong. Photo credit: Emma Jackman

Hilary Palevsky (kneeling, right) with Wellesley students Emma Jackman (kneeling, left) and Lucy Wanzer (standing), next to one of the gliders configured for air calibration of the oxygen sensor, while preparing for deployment at the Irminger Sea Array. Photo credit: Henry Holm

As oceanographers seek to uncover the mysteries of the oceans and their dynamic basins, the necessity of large observational programs and datasets is becoming ever more apparent (see Lindstrom 2018). These datasets, however, are vast, diverse, and complex, leading to new challenges in data organization, management, access, and analysis.

The National Science Foundations’ Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) currently supports approximately 760 deployed sensors that continuously produce over 200 unique data from the seafloor to the air-sea interface. The OOI Cyberinfrastructure now serves over 250 terabytes of data, with more data coming in every second.

“The size and complexity of ocean data is growing beyond the capacity of what one person and one computer can handle,” says Friedrich Knuth, OOI Data Evaluator. “We need to be thinking of collaborative, cloud-based tools to really explore the capacity of these data.”

“Big data” is not a challenge exclusive to the OOI, or the oceanographic community, the issue permeates throughout the scientific world and is the impetus for the creation of hackweeks by the eScience Institute.

“Our goal is data democratization,” says Amanda Tan, eScience Institute Cloud Technology Lead. “We want to get data out to anyone and everyone who wants to use and work with it in a meaningful way. To do that, we use hackweeks as an avenue to help users build open source, reproducible tools that can turn sensor data into publishable results.”

In February 2018 the UW eScience Institute, in collaboration with UW Applied Physics Laboratory and the OOI, hosted the first ever ocean related event, the Cabled Array Hack Week (CAHW), focusing on data from the OOI Cabled Array. The event was a three-day immersive experience with about 25 participants ranging from students through senior scientists.

The CAHW was a grass roots effort led by, Wu-Jung Lee, a researcher at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and an early adopter of OOI data.

“I started out as a domain scientist, really focused in my one area. But I have realized that I need to dig more into my computational skill set to work with these large data sets,” says Lee. “After working with eScience last year on another project, I had the idea that we should create a Hackweek for the oceans.”

Lee then brought her idea to the eScience Institute, the OOI Cabled Array team based at the UW, and the OOI Data Team based at Rutgers University to see if they would be interested. “I knew what I wanted to see happen with this hackweek, but not how to get there. The team was what made it a successful event.”

The goal of the Hackweek was to build a stronger user community around the Cabled Array, and to create and promote effective computational data analysis workflows of the real-time data stream.

For three days, hackweek participants devoted themselves to OOI data and collaborative group projects. The hackweek was structured with tutorials focused on “how tos” for data mining, processing, and visualization techniques, while most of the time was spent in small groups hacking away on their own individual projects.

“The key to hackweeks is that they are immersive,” says Knuth. “Everyone brings a unique perspective to the table and is committed to being there together sweating through the code and the data. For example, we had APL Cabled Array engineer Eric McCrae, designer of the Shallow Profiler Mooring, working with a group developing code to process the data from that platform. That was a big highlight of the week for me, to see the potential of that kind of end-to-end relationship.”

Projects currently being developed include a mobile app to identify whale vocalizations from OOI Cabled Array Hydrophone data entitled “Whaldr.” As the name suggests, it is loosely based on the social networking app, Tinder, where users swipe right or left to determine if there is a whale making noises. Other projects include the creation of a draft common data format to better share and process acoustic data from scientific echosounders and Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers. More details on projects can be found on the Cabled Array Hack Week website.

“We hold the standard for data visualization and access in our pockets,” says Knuth holding up his smart phone. “Scientists should have the same tools to make data equally as easily accessible and understandable. eScience is working towards helping us make that possible.”

After a successful workshop on Cabled Array data, the team is not done. They will be running an OOI-wide Oceanhackweek with data spanning all of the arrays in August. Click here for more details and to apply.

The OOI Cabled Array Hack Week was supported by the University of Washington School of Oceanography, the Applied Physics Laboratory, the eScience Institute, and the Ocean Observatories Initiative. In addition to Knuth, Lee, and Tan, organizers included Valentina Staneva, Rob Fatland, and Aaron Marburg.

Exciting conversations on a multitude of topics happened around the room during the hacking sessions. Credit: Valentina Staneva, eScience, UW

Existing conversations on a multitude of topics happened around the room during the hacking sessions. Credit: Valentina Staneva, eScience, UW

In February 2015, the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) dropped anchor at 55oS and made history with the deployment of the most southerly surface mooring established as a sustained ocean observing platform.

The OOI Global Southern Ocean Array is one of four sites in the OOI focusing on the critical, yet under-sampled, high-latitude regions of the Pacific and Atlantic. One of the primary scientific objectives of deploying this array was to provide key data to a very sparsely sampled area to better help modelers and forecasters understand the dynamic and volatile environment of the Southern Ocean.

These data are contributing to an international effort to improve environmental prediction for the polar regions and beyond known as the Year of Polar Prediction that runs from mid-2017 to mid-2019 and is organized by the WMO.

In just the few weeks since its integration into the GTS, these data have been tagged as having a big forecast impact by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

On August 19, 2017, the Surface Buoy picked up a low pressure system moving through the area. By integrating these data into their forecast models, researchers were able to fill in some key spatial gaps in their observational coverage and overall reduce their 24-hr forecast error. With errors reduced in their forecast model, ECMWF was then better able to forecast the next huge Southern Ocean storm with a central pressure around 955 mb that had simultaneous major impacts on southern South America, Drake Passage, and the Antarctic Peninsula.

In addition to its surface buoy, the OOI Southern Ocean Array includes a network of moorings that support sensors for measurement of air-sea fluxes of heat, moisture and momentum; physical, biological and chemical properties throughout the water column. A full list of instrumentation on the Array is posted on the OOI website and data can be downloaded from the OOI Data Portal, as well as accessed through the GTS.

A new computer vision routine, developed by Aaron Marburg at UW-APL and aided by Tim Crone at LDEO and Friedrich Knuth at Rutgers, is now able to correctly identify and tag scenes of scientific interest in the CAMHD video stream. These scenes were previously being manually identified by students at Rutgers University, a process which has been greatly accelerated by the team’s work. With this enhanced metadata record, a brand new set of time lapse videos has been created, displaying a frame captured every three hours from November, 2015 to July, 2016. There are 9 scenes of scientific interest, which are recorded at two or three zoom levels, depending on the camera routine. The naming convention for the videos is deployment_(dx) position_(px) zoom-level_(zx). For more information on the different scene tags, see the regions description on GitHub.

On August 21, the path of totality of the “Eclipse Across America” will pass directly over two OOI Coastal Endurance Array Surface Moorings, adjacent to one, and close to three others. These moorings will “see” the eclipse minutes before it is seen from the mainland.

These moorings are part of the long term monitoring infrastructure of the OOI, and were not specifically designed for the eclipse. Being present in the ocean 24/7 through the OOI infrastructure allows scientists to be at the right time in the right place, at no additional cost. It enables anyone with an internet connection to download data and study once in a lifetime events, such as the eclipse, volcanic eruptions, rogue waves and many other episodic events that can greatly impact our planet. We are lucky to be in the narrow path of totality and are excited to share the eclipse data we will be collecting in real time with the community.

Several existing sensors on the OOI moorings will provide unique insight of the impact of the eclipse on the coastal Oregon environment. These include measurements of sunlight (shortwave radiation), air temperature, water temperature, and movements of creatures within the water column (bio-acoustic sonar).

These measurements are described below and displayed in graphs that will be updated daily. Additionally, in preparation of the eclipse passing over these moorings, the OOI Data and Engineering teams have increased the sampling rate of the two bioacoustic sonars along the eclipse path to be able to catch changes in movements of organisms in the water column during the brief time of the eclipse.

Incoming sunlight, shortwave radiation, will be reduced during the eclipse. It can also be reduced by clouds, which are likely to occur in the morning at our shelf locations and less likely to occur at our offshore locations. (Note: the solar panels on our Westport Shelf mooring aren’t working, so it isn’t sampling as often as the other moorings.)

Reduced sunlight will reduce the rate at which the sun warms the air in the morning. During previous eclipses air temperature has dropped several degrees. Air temperature measured a few meters above the ocean surface by our mooring will be moderated by the ocean water, so it will likely change a lot less than air temperature over land at the coast.

Water temperature measured on the bottom of our buoys (~1 m down) is likely to change by much less than the air temperature during the eclipse, but we might see something, so we are plotting these data too.

The OOI Oregon Shelf Benthic Experiment Package, which houses the bioacoustic sonar, is connected to shore via a fiber-optic cable, so all of its data are available in real-time and it can sample continuously. This instrument sits in a frame on the seafloor looking up from 80m depth.

A second cabled bioacoustic sonar is mounted, looking upward, on the 200m Platform of the Oregon Offshore Cabled Shallow Profiler Mooring. The mooring is located along slope at the edge of the continental shelf in 600m of water. The Shallow Profiler on the mooring goes up near the surface and back down to the platform 9 times a day. One can see the profiler’s path in the backscatter data. As with the Benthic Experiment Package, the Shallow Profiler Mooring is connected to shore via a fiber-optic cable.

Bioacoustic Sonars are also located on several Endurance Array surface moorings, but these sensors are battery operated and not cabled to shore. As a result, they sample less frequently and are able to only telemeter a small fraction of their data to shore every day. All of their data will be placed online after the instruments are recovered this October.

Content on this page was derived from a webpage created by Craig Risien, Chris Wingard, and Jonathan Fram, who work on OOI at Oregon State University. Oregon State University operates and maintains Coastal Endurance Array moorings and gliders for the OOI. The University of Washington operates and maintains cabled benthic packages and moorings on the Coastal Endurance Array as well as other cabled OOI infrastructure.

The Axial Seamount Biology Catalog is a collection of stunning video and still imagery obtained during the Construction and Operation and Maintenance phases of the National Science Foundations’ Regional Cable Array spanning 2011 to 2016. The catalog currently contains 39 unique faunal entries, 63 videos, and 62 images.

The project was initially created by undergraduate student participants onboard R/V Thompson during the UW-NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) VISIONS’14 construction cruise in 2014. The students set out to create a resource for scientists and community members to utilize for identification of organisms at Axial Seamount. The students also wanted to create a resource for interested viewers watching video streamed live during the cruise.

During transits to the seafloor with remotely operated vehicles (ROV), organisms are commonly observed during dives or as they interact with the equipment/ROV. These cruises are dominantly focused on engineering (getting the Cabled Array infrastructure and sensors on and off the seafloor), so the scientists onboard the cruises rarely focus directly on the animals and onboard staffing does not include a dedicated biologist. Therefore, the students set out to create this resource for the community.

The students combed through hours of old high definition video and video as it was collected in 2014 and complied this imagery with still photos and information from the Internet about each observed animal. This preoject was initiated by students on the first leg and was eventually taken up by students on all seven legs of the VISIONS14 cruise. Follow-on work on the catalog was done by undergraduates on the VISIONS’15 cruise in 2015. In total 8 undergraduate students, have worked on the project with backgrounds in oceanography, biology, engineering, and marine biology.

The hope for the project is that it will constantly be improving as more imagery is collected during the OOI’s lifetime and through contribution by scientific experts, students, and the community.

Undergraduate students at Rutgers University have used still frames extracted from the HD Video camera (CAMHD) to compile time-lapse videos of the hydrothermal vent, under the direction of the OOI Data Team. There are 7 biological scenes of interest, captured during the pan/zoom routine of each video. The students are helping produce metadata by time-stamping each scene of interest in every video file on the archive. The students then ran code provided by the OOI Data Team to produce time-lapse videos and watch the vent change over time at each of the scenes of interest. More videos and additional post-processing techniques will be added over time, using open-access tools.